Mercy Otis Warren

Who was Mercy Otis Warren?

Mercy Otis Warren was a political writer and propagandist of the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, topics such as politics and war were thought to be the province of men. Few men and fewer women had the education or training to write about these subjects. Warren was an exception. During the years before the American Revolution, Warren published poems and plays that attacked royal authority in Massachusetts and urged colonists to resist British infringements on colonial rights and liberties.

During the debate over the United States Constitution in 1788, she issued a pamphlet, written under the pseudonym "A Columbian Patriot," that opposed ratification of the document and advocated the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. In 1790, she published a collection of poems and plays under her own name, a highly unusual occurrence for a woman at the time. In 1805, she published one of the earliest histories of the American war for independence, a three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. This was also the first history of the Revolution authored by a woman.